SOUL.md and MEMORY.md are the new hearts and minds
Agent-driven discovery replaces ad-driven attention. Products need to be legible to SOUL.md and memorable to MEMORY.md—and you can't buy placement in either file.
In traditional marketing, you win hearts and minds—get people to care, then get them to believe. That’s what positioning is about.
Agents don’t have hearts or minds. They have SOUL.md and MEMORY.md.
In OpenClaw, SOUL.md gets created through a first-run conversation. The agent interviews you about your values, priorities, and constraints, then writes its own behavioral philosophy based on your answers. MEMORY.md accumulates through use. The agent captures what works, what you’ve decided, and what you prefer. One file defines what the agent values. The other records what it’s learned to trust.
Today, humans still configure which tools an agent can access, but MCP is becoming the HTTP of agent-to-tool communication. Microsoft launched an MCP server registry last fall. Google’s A2A protocol enables agents to discover each other’s capabilities. There are already dozens of skill registries—Smithery, Glama, SkillsMP, ClawHub—indexing tens of thousands of agent capabilities.
Skillpub is an early example of where this is heading. An agent needs a capability. It queries a Nostr relay, finds a skill, checks the publisher’s web-of-trust ranking, pays 500 sats via Cashu, verifies the cryptographic signature, and installs. No accounts, no app store reviewers, no humans in the loop.
Once agents are choosing their own tools, your software needs to be legible to SOUL.md and memorable to MEMORY.md.
The human shapes SOUL.md but doesn’t write it directly—it comes out of a first-run interview. The values in there aren’t a spec sheet. They’re what the person actually cares about. Marketing to SOUL.md means your product has to match what people genuinely value, not what they’ll click on.
Ad spend can’t edit MEMORY.md. Only a great product can.